From contented devotion to exhilarating freedom -- a detailed analytical account

I am a 31-year-old female, firstborn, an ISTJ on the Myers-Briggs personality scale, highly intelligent (IQ 153). I was raised by an authoritarian father and a meek, loving mother, as a conservative (Missouri Synod) Lutheran. As a child (4-6 years old), I dedicated myself to Jesus, with all the seriousness I was capable of, after watching a Billy Graham crusade on TV. I renewed my dedication in early adolescence (12-13 years old), and for the rest of my life until several years ago my core identity was as a Christian. I prayed and studied the Bible 30-60 minutes each day, was extremely active in church activities and witnessing, gave 10-15% of my gross income to religious and other charitable organizations, cultivated a reputation as a serious Christian, and strove to maintain the highest moral integrity both publicly and privately.

My motivation in all of this was my conviction that Christianity was True. I didn't have any noteworthy "success stories" in my prayer life; prayer and worship were not emotional experiences for me. I did get immense satisfaction from the feeling of being approved by God, and I thrived on the framework provided by Christian philosophy for my daily decision-making.

In college I majored in chemistry and mathematics and minored in computer science. Since college I've been an engineer with IBM. I was increasingly drawn to science as a powerful way of understanding the world (God's creation). I pursued my scientific reading with full intellectual energy. I soon became aware of the apparent difficulties reconciling some scientific discoveries with Christian doctrine, but had full confidence that Christian revelation and the scientific method were both valid ways of learning truth, and that ultimately there could be no contradiction. I got special pleasure thinking, reading, and debating about how details of Christian Truth might be reconciled with scientific findings.

Prompted by my inability to answer a number of perfectly reasonable intellectual challenges to Christianity posed by others during discussions, I intensified my reading in Christian philosophy. I wanted to find a way to demonstrate, or at least support, the truth of Christianity, that would be accessible to anyone open-minded enough to consider it, using their own senses and reason. If Christianity is true, there must be something in the universe that we can point to that would clearly be different if Christianity were NOT true.

I read a lot of books and articles, and talked to a lot of people. Only a few even understood my quest, much less tried to address it. C. S. Lewis was one of the few writers who proposed an answer; he pointed to the universal sense of conscience as the thing that is explained most easily by Christianity. That seemed fairly weak to me, especially since I understood (from Richard Dawkins and Robert Axelrod) how natural selection and learned strategies were adequate and elegant explanations for the the existence of conscience (or one of its observable effects, altruistic behavior).

In fact, the more I read, the more I seemed to find that whatever phenomenon Christianity claimed to be the explanation for, natural selection (genetic or memetic) provided an explanation that was simpler, more elegant, and altogether neater. This was in dramatic contrast to the contortions that Christian doctrine has had to undergo through the years in order to accomodate new scientific discoveries. And as a bonus, natural selection offered a wholly adequate explanation of the development of religions, and was consistent with the success of Christianity in particular! In short, the evolutionary paradigm did a much better job of explaining the phenomenon of Christian belief than the other way around. [Christians fundamentalists are right to fear the teaching of evolution!]

Gradually I realized that I simply did not believe Christianity any more. It was not a decision but a discovery -- one is either persuaded that something is true, or one isn't. It was not a moment, or an hour, or a day; it occurred gradually over months. The first step was the biggest: it dawned on me for the first time that Christianity may not be true after all, at least not in the form I believed. Acknowledging that possibility, I became a little more critical in my reading; I was now open to arguments on the other side of the question. As I continued to search without any significant results, I began to seriously entertain the possibility that Christianity was without foundation. I began to suspect that the answers to the questions I was asking weren't just difficult to find or to understand, but perhaps didn't exist at all. The questions that others had raised, which had sparked my search, now became my own questions.

My loyalty was to the truth; if I found I'd been wrong about the truth of Christianity, I was ready to abandon that set of beliefs. And the more I read, the more naturally the world seemed to fit into an evolutionary paradigm, and the more clear it became that Christian doctrines were an awkward fit at best. And I could find no one who believed Christianity for what I considered to be sound reasons.

I am not one to make radical life changes quickly; I like to allow time for reflection before making an important decision, to "integrate" my thoughts and feelings over time, instead of basing it on one data point. I gave myself a year for this one. Not to decide whether to believe Christianity or not (for I could not choose to "believe" something I didn't think was true), but to decide whether to abandon my search altogether and start developing a new worldview. I didn't practice my religious "duties" during that year -- prayer, Bible reading, worship -- although if I had been drawn to them for reasons other than duty, I would have done them. (But I wasn't.) I did continue reading in Christian philosophy and science, but without much expectation of finding what I was looking for. Throughout the year, the signs were steady; when the year had passed, the decision was clear.

When I first admitted to myself that I didn't believe Christianity any more, I was utterly terrified. "What if it's true, and I don't believe it?" The question itself seems poised on the knife's edge between belief and unbelief. Looking from the side of belief into the uncharted void of unbelief was terrifying -- Hell held unspeakable fear, and I knew it was worth far more fear even than I felt. There was no corresponding fear on the other side that was nearly so compelling, but the fact remained that I simply didn't believe any longer. I may have thought briefly of taking Pascal's wager (being a believer because the expected value of the outcome is incomparably higher as a believer even if the odds of Christianity's being true are very low), but I knew the fallacies of that argument. And in truth, I did not feel there was any decision facing me -- like it or not, I simply didn't believe.

My next reaction was a feeling of unfathomable, bottomless purposelessness. I remember several days when I was walking around in a sort of daze, feeling that nothing was quite real; everything had changed. The world was not "in God's hands," which made it a much scarier place. No one was behind the scenes, patching things up when people made a mess; for the first time I felt genuinely capable of screwing up badly. And there was no one enveloping me with steadfast, perfect Love. The world was confusing, scary, and cold.

At about this same time, I was also breaking up with my boyfriend of 9 years, and my younger sister ran away from home, became pregnant, and got into trouble with the law. I craved a friend to go to for support in these two major crises as well as for my philosophical crisis, but the circumstances and the timing were such that I had no one. And now not even God to cry to! I felt more completely alone than I had ever felt, or had even imagined possible.

For a while I was able to switch mentally back and forth between the old Christian paradigm and my new, developing one, and could easily view things from either perspective. But as my new paradigm developed (I could almost feeling the neurons re-routing themselves in my brain!), that became harder, and I no longer felt the need to continue comparing the two anyway.

The question at the root of my belief or unbelief in Christianity was always, "Is it true?" In most accounts I am aware of in which someone went from belief to unbelief, the motivation seemed to be a feeling of betrayal by God, or an attraction to a lifestyle forbidden under the belief system, or a growing apathy about the spiritual realm. As far as I am consciously aware, these were not motivating factors in my loss of belief. Brains being neural nets, however, and not inference engines, I realize that I don't have conscious access to the reasons behind my loss of belief, and I acknowledge that there were doubtless a number of other factors influencing my change in beliefs.

I didn't make any grand announcements to friends and family, just allowing my honest remarks to speak for themselves as relevant subjects came up. "Coming out" to my Christian friends was painful and sad; I knew we were losing something special we had shared, and I knew I would become to them a prospect for conversion.

Without Christianity, morality was all over the floor. Morality (as the word is understood within Christianity) has no place in my current worldview. There are only ends and means (which can be effective or ineffective), and pleasures, which we feel for various causes for which we have been programmed by our genes. However, since I believe that there are good practical reasons that the Christian moral system developed and has lasted as long as it has, and since I doubt my own ability to foresee all the significant effects of my actions, and also probably from a need to keep something stable and familiar in the midst of philosophical unheaval, I still live in a way that is generally consistent with Christian morality, with a few significant exceptions. But the feel is entirely different; the motivation is decidedly more selfish.

Once I released my old Christian worldview, I noticed two dramatic effects (again, discoveries, not decisions). One was an almost total lack of fear; I had been blind to the amount of fear (and guilt) I'd been staggering under as a Christian. In every realm of life, I now felt free of fear. It was a glorious, tremendous, exciting feeling, full of possibilities! (Rather like ... being born again!) It seemed ironic, because now for the first time I also felt able to make genuine blunders, without God fixing things up for me afterwards -- shouldn't I feel more afraid? But perhaps it was simply that I felt I'd gone through the worst crisis I could have imagined, and came through on my own strength, and now felt I could handle anything. Or perhaps it's that I've already done the most dangerous thing of all, giving up faith and risking Hell....

The other significant effect I discovered was a compelling sense of urgency in life. My life expectancy dropped from infinity to just a few decades! Life is short, short indeed, and when I die that's the end. There's so much I want to experience!

In the 3 years or so since this change occurred, I've enjoyed exploring the world with new eyes. The change was immense; everything needed re-thinking. Before, I "had all the answers;" now there is this wonderful sense of adventure to life, of so many things to explore and discover. (I suddenly crave travel, something I'd been indifferent to before.) I am no longer a soul that has a body, but a body that has a mind. As a result, my identity is a less cerebral one, more "body-centered," more oriented to the here-and-now, more healthy, more integrated. One thing that seems not to have changed is my basic personality -- for example, I am nearly as strongly ISTJ now as I was before.

Of course, Christian philosophy and culture are so enmeshed in my thinking that I'm sure they'll always exert a strong influence. But I'm quite pleased at the speed and relative ease with which I seem to have been able to adjust to losing the very core of my identity, and at the sense of well-being that I now have. I've experienced how strong and resilient I am, and it is good.

(Written in 1993.)